Other songs savour of the ale-house rather than of college halls. These look back to the folk-poetry. Drinking songs were, assuredly, one of the early types of communal verse, and the folk-element is apparent in many fifteenth century convivial songs, as, indeed, in the corresponding verse of the Elizabethans. Such well known refrains as Hey trolly lolly and Dole the ale are of venerable antiquity, and the songs which consist of variations of a common phrase show an indebtedness, of course, immediate or remote, to communal poetry. Thus, such a song as the following plainly took its cue from the folk-song:

This song, however, can hardly claim so remote an ancestry as another, in which the repetitional phrases are, in themselves, of no significance, and are merely used as framework. This is evidence of remote origin, as the study of comparative literature testifies, and the little Latin courtesy with which the song introduces itself cannot conceal its real age:

A merry song that links the convivial poem to the satire on women is the narrative of the gay gossips who hie them to the tavern, and there, tucked away, discuss their husbands, though not without many an anxious eye on the door.61

The song of the death dance is represented in several manuscripts by a most melancholy and singularly powerful poem. The insistent holding of the mind to one thought, with no avenue of escape left open; the inexorableness of monotonous rimes; the irregular combination of monosyllables, imabics and anapaests, that strike like gusts of hail in a hurtling storm; all these aid in compelling heavy-hearted acquiescence: